The Dead Girl
by MadClairvoyant
Summary: No one crossed Walburga Black


No one crossed Walburga Black. She was four when she first met her cousin. Well, second cousin, if one wanted to be picky about it, and perhaps this detail will be come very, very, important, later in her life. But for now, all that mattered was that he was another cousin on the family tree that she had to memorise, another cousin, all silly and dull, and another cousin she had to put on a smile for. She hated him. And that was that. No matter what the adults said or hinted at, she shut out with her usual grace and remained stewing in her childish anger. Really, he wasn't that bad; he had black hair, grey eyes, high cheekbones, terribly pale skin. Overall, they made up quite a handsome picture. But for darling Walburga, those were her black hair, her cheekbones, her porcelain white skin, and he had no right to them, never mind that half of the family had it. From that day, she treasured her deep, sparkling blue eyes, because they were hers; that unique shade between the bright blue of the sky and the shadows that haunted her house, was all hers. She was sixteen when she met him again; throughout the years, they did see each other at the endlessly torturous family gatherings that they had, but she and not really met him, only catching glimpses of his hard, blank expression and rigid posture. He was stiff, formal, boring, mindless; he parroted the family's motto without understanding it, speaking about things without feeling. Orion Black was a handsome and hollow shell of a pureblood boy after too many years of inbreeding and coddling. Walburga Black was pretty and fierce, burning with a dangerous fire and walking the fine line between sanity and madness. She was alive, she was beautiful. Or she was. As she languished in the prison of a marriage with a boy she disdained, trapped by society's expectations and his dead eyes, something in her began to die too; her life ebbing away in the his lifeless embrace, her fire extinguished with the weariness of her newfound maturity. All that she had left was an old rage, simmering beneath her wooden exterior, occasionally bursting forth when her ire was raised. By the time she was forty five, she had had her two children, both boys, fulfilling her duty. They looked quite as alike each other as Walburga and Orion did, with the same features and voices, right down to the way they smiled. But the difference was in how where Regulus was quiet and empty, merely speaking words that he couldn't comprehend, whereas Sirius was as a force to be reckoned with, as bright as she was, in her youth. When he left, it hurt her, making her truly feel something other than fury in years. But the betrayal was just another wound in her blackened heart; it festered and rotted, like any other, turning into a white-hot anger she was only too familiar with, as she railed and ranted, focusing all of that on the worthless muggles and the boy who had put her in this gilded cage, with his tarnished, silver words of duty and obligation, of broken promises and family; the dead boy who took her life away too. When even her youngest son, whom she never truly cared for, because his eyes and words were all her husband's, and his smile was as fragile as hers had been, was dead, taken away from her by the cause that she had supported all her life, she lost her reason. It was that spineless, useless boy, with no soul in his eyes or heart in his chest, who brought about all this misery, who had given her youngest that weakness and cowardice that killed him, taking away the only thing she had left, loved or not. When Orion Black died the same year as Regulus did, no one said anything. Instead, they merely commiserated her on her lost, with her husband and son dead in one year, and the eldest strayed. Not that they knew that their words were feeding the fire deep in her heart, burning fiercely once again, this time spreading to the rest of her body, eager to destroy everything in its way, and desiring to have complete control over her, consuming her mind, her soul, her body and heart until she was a smoking pile of ashes, smelling faintly of old vengeance and wounds too deep to truly heal. No one crossed Walburga Black. 


End file.
